A new client called and nobody wrote it down properly
The note says "Maria? Marie?" and a phone number with one digit you can't read. Here's how the first twenty minutes of a new client stop being a lottery.
The note says Maria? Marie? — rear-ended in a car park — call back after three.
It’s on the back of an envelope, in handwriting that was in a hurry. One digit of the phone number could be a 3 or an 8. The person who took the call is off until Thursday.
She rang on Monday. It’s Wednesday.
Somewhere in those two days she has either decided you’re on it, or she has rung the firm on the next line of the search results — the one that answered, asked her the date of the accident, took the other driver’s insurer, and told her what happens next.
What the note actually costs
Count a normal fortnight. Say twenty enquiries come in: some by phone, some through the form on the website, one or two from a client who gave your name to a neighbour.
Doing intake properly on each one is a quarter of an hour — the story, the dates, the other side, whether anyone else has already advised them, whether you can act at all. Then ten minutes writing it up so a fee earner can read it without ringing the client back to ask the same questions again.
Twenty enquiries at twenty-five minutes each is a little over eight hours a fortnight. If that’s your own time at $60 an hour, it’s $500. If it’s a paralegal at $30, it’s $250 and half a week they spent typing instead of doing work you can bill.
That’s the part you can see.
The part you can’t see is the conflict check that happened on day four instead of day one, when somebody finally opened the file and recognised the surname on the other side. It’s the limitation date that spent the weekend living in a voicemail. It’s the client telling you the whole thing again in the first meeting, patiently, while you take the notes that should already exist — and forming a quiet private opinion about how you run things.
And it’s the enquiry you never hear about again. That one costs the most and appears nowhere, because nobody writes down the client they didn’t get.
How it gets handled
None of this is about who you act for. It’s about the first twenty minutes being the same twenty minutes every time — whoever answers, and whether or not anybody answers.
Here’s the order it actually happens in.
1. Enquiry comes in. The call that goes to voicemail at 6:40, the form at midnight, the email with one line and no phone number. All three land in the same place.
2. The same questions get asked. Names, dates, what happened, who else is involved, what they’ve already been told, and anything with a deadline attached. The list is yours. You write it once, and it’s the list a good intake call covers on a day when nobody’s in a rush.
3. Conflict check runs. Every name given goes against the names you already act for, and against. Anything touching an existing matter stops there and comes to you — before anybody hears something they shouldn’t have heard.
4. Written up as a file note. One summary, in the order your fee earners read things, in the system where matters actually live. Not a transcript. The note you’d have written yourself if you’d had the twenty minutes.
5. On your desk before you call back. With the obvious next step on it: take it, decline it, refer it out.
In the catalog this is the Legal Intake Assistant, and the job is narrower than the name makes it sound: take the details, check the names, write the note. It has never once got to Wednesday and realised it forgot.
A few versions of it:
The family practice. Two partners, and the thing that keeps you up at night is acting for someone you can’t. Names go against the list the moment they’re given — not after the first appointment, by which point you’ve heard forty minutes of one side’s account of a marriage and can’t un-hear any of it.
The personal injury solo. Every enquiry gets asked the same two dates: when it happened, and when they received anything in writing about it. Those are the dates that decide whether you have a case or an apology to make. They get asked for at the start, every time, including on the Friday you take the call standing in a car park.
The conveyancing practice. Volume, and a list of unglamorous details nobody enjoys asking for: the address, the firm on the other side, the lender, whether there’s a chain, who’s paying what. Collected at first contact, so the file opens the same day instead of after three rounds of email that each take a day to come back.
Intake only helps once somebody actually reaches you, and most of them don’t. Forty visitors a day and none of their names is the step before this one.
What it won’t do
It doesn’t decide whether to take the matter. That’s a judgement about the client, the merits and whether you want the work, and it needs a lawyer rather than a form. What you get is the same information every time to make it on.
It doesn’t advise anybody. What goes back to a caller confirms the details, says who’ll be in touch and when, and stops. You approve that wording before it goes anywhere, and at the start nothing reaches a caller without you reading it first.
It can’t check a conflict against something you never wrote down. The list it sees is the list your system holds. The matter that lives in a partner’s memory, or in a box file in the back room, isn’t on it — the check is only as honest as the records behind it.
And it won’t fix a firm that doesn’t ring people back. If enquiries sit for three days because everyone’s in court and the callback belongs to nobody in particular, better notes just give you a tidier record of the ones you lost.
Stop losing a client to a note nobody could read.
Operio builds and runs the AI workers that take a job like this off your desk — set up around how you actually work, watched over, and improved as it goes. You approve everything before it reaches a customer.
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